a thousand furnished rooms

She picked up one of our little shopping baskets—this was a good sign. When she started her way up and down our toiletries aisle, I took her for a tourist staying at one of the local hotels or perhaps a rich girl from one of the better apartment buildings nearby. The tourist idea was especially intriguing. I had spent lots of time helping tourists that summer—with directions, restaurant recommendations, and purchases. Earlier that same week, I had sold about 200 toothbrushes to a visiting dentist from Brazil. I was beginning to entertain the idea of a long conversation when she came around one of the displays and I saw her head to toe for the first time. I can only remember that I was so overwhelmed by how sexy she was that I could only formulate exactly that thought—I would do almost anything to have her end up spending a long time in the store that day.

My reverie was immediately broken, though. When you spend a lot of time in the city, you develop something akin to spider sense, and the man entering the store just behind my beautiful customer was clearly trouble. He was short and thick, and what was left of the blonde hair on his head was long, matted, and pointing in every direction. And he was wired—every part of his body was in motion, and no two things were going in the same direction. Somehow, though, he made straight for me, and handed me a prescription. I didn't have to even look at it to know it was bogus.

Junkies are usually pretty resourceful. Somehow they get these prescriptions—sometimes from real doctors that they have conned into believing they have a problem, sometimes from doctors that are knowingly enabling them. But they also steal other people's valid prescriptions, or get a relative or friend to fake a complaint to get a real prescription. There is also outright forgery—the junkie's desired fix written out on a prescription blank in the same jargon and format a real doctor would use.

Junkies who forge prescriptions are also usually, for lack of a better word, reasonable. They know what normal doses usually are, so, if they were forging a prescription, they would write it for an amount that made sense. For instance, if their drug of choice were cough syrup with codeine, they would write a prescription for four ounces or eight ounces; 16 ounces would be pushing it, and no one writes for more than 16 ounces unless they are medicating a horse. Similar with pain killers. First of all, painkillers are only prescribed for a short amount of time—typically less than a week. Thus, a prescription for Tylenol with codeine might call for 3 pills a day for 5 days, and that would be from a liberal doctor. So a doctor doesn't write a painkiller prescription asking for 40 pills to be consumed in 5 days, unless he is Dr. Kevorkian.

The one drug that afforded some latitude for junkies were sedatives like Quaalude. A sedative could be reasonably prescribed for a month at a time, typically for one pill a day, but sometimes for two. A prescription then, for 30 Quaalude is reasonable, and 60 would be pushing it. Mr. Jumpy, though, had just handed me a prescription for 100 Quaalude. Not only was it too many, but it wasn't even divisible by 30. Plus, while he had been savvy enough to at least write it in ink, his handwriting was heavy enough to give the impression it was written in black crayon.

At least I had a read on the situation now. He wasn't a stickup guy; he was a junkie. This would play out the way every scene with a junkie would play out. I would walk the prescription back to our pharmacist, who would busy himself for a few moments and then, very soberly, come around from behind his big counter in back, hand the prescription to the junkie, and say, "I'm sorry, but we're out of stock." The junkie would know he was "made"—that the pharmacist had him figured out, and would take the prescription back and leave. All would return to normal.

Before I tell what happened next, I should explain the layout of the store a bit, and where all the principal players were standing as the scene unfolded. Imagine two long counters at a right angle to each other. The pharmacist's counter is at the back of the store, raised about two feet above the floor of the store. My counter ran along one wall of the store, running from the pharmacist's counter out to the front door of the store, probably about 30 feet away. Mr. Jumpy handed me the prescription at the far cash register, about 20 feet away from the pharmacist's counter. I had to take it from him, say something polite, and walk the 20 feet back to the pharmacist, Harry, who happened to be on duty that day. I then returned to my register, and Mr. Jumpy started drifting down toward Harry. This left me face to face with the stunning Elena, whose name I would learn later when we were cleaning up.

It has been 27 years since this event happened, and I can still see the next moments in my mind as clearly as if it were yesterday. What I still don't understand is why Harry said what came out of his mouth next.

I am sure Harry thought it was the right thing to do. Indeed, the normal approach of saying the drug was "out of stock" was merely a polite way of passing off the problem to someone else. Maybe Harry was finally sick of not doing the right thing. Maybe—and I think this is probably a better guess—he was offended by Mr. Jumpy's stupidity and heavy-handedness. Whatever motivated him though, Harry did the most astonishing thing. Looking down at Mr. Jumpy from behind his counter, a safe several feet away and above the fray, Harry picked up the phone, and with the phone in one hand and the bogus prescription in the other said, "This is a fake prescription, and I am calling the police."

Do you know the expression, "steam came out of his ears"? Well, that doesn't happen, or at least it didn't happen in Mr. Jumpy's case. Instead, he hopped in place, screamed "You fucker!" and lunged at the cast iron cash register in front of him and at the far end of my counter. Now I had tried to move the cash registers on occasion; you can hardly budge them. But Mr. Jumpy shoved that register clean off the counter and into the glass display case behind it. He then began charging down the counter toward me, lunging and clearing everything off the counter as he did—a case of watches, several feet of cascading shelves holding pills and sundries, the entire 12 feet of candy display. Now he was to me, and the second cast iron cash register was rocketing at my groin. I somehow avoided it, diving sideways over and onto the tumbling candy. In my lunge, I briefly caught Elena's eye and had the silly thought that I hoped I looked pretty cool jumping.

Before I could get back to my feet, Mr. Jumpy had cleared the rest of the counter and made it to the door. Thank God, I thought, he is fleeing. But then I saw Harry dash across the store and reach Mr. Jumpy, grabbing him by the scruff just as he reached the door. Now I always point out that I am not much of a fighter. At that age, I was 6'2 and 155 pounds. I wasn't scaring anyone. But next to Harry, I looked like an Adonis. He was several inches taller and somehow about 20 pounds lighter than me. I quickly sized Mr. Jumpy at about 5'6" and 225 pounds. I watched as Mr. Jumpy, stumbling to get loose of Harry's grip, wound up with a punch from the floor, aiming at Harry's head several feet away. It was such a slow arcing punch, and it had to cover such a distance, that I had time to visualize it reaching Harry and tearing his head clean off his shoulders. Thank God again, this time Harry had the presence of mind to duck, the punch missed, Mr. Jumpy pulled away, and bolted from the store.

You can imagine the obvious parts of the aftermath. Police were called, and came. Statements were made, descriptions given. The offending prescription was offered as evidence. The police called an ambulance over Harry's objections and the EMTs checked him out. He was fine. A small crowd gathered and gawked for a while. Finally, the police and EMTs left, and the crowd moved on. Harry wearily directed me to start straightening up, and went to call some other clerks to see if they could come in and help out. I was just sizing up the 30 feet of mayhem when I realized that Elena was standing at my elbow, still holding the basket of things she intended to buy.

"Oh, gosh, yeah," I said, snapping back into my role. "You probably want to pay for those things, don't you?"

I almost couldn't complete my thought before we were both giggling. Even if I could have gotten to the cash registers, they were covered in glass and debris. (We would later find out one was irreparably broken, prompting the owner to buy all new equipment.) Glancing at her basket, I could see none of it was essential. I could only shrug my shoulders and keep giggling nervously, not sure how to act again in front of this stunning young woman.

Even at 19, I knew how wonderful and therapeutic hugs are. How even in the times of the greatest sadness and stress, a long, firm hug can be the most reassuring and giving thing. So when Elena put down her basket and reached up to all her height and enveloped me in a long hug, my 19 year old body fought through the myriad sensations—the wonderful scent of her lotion and shampoo, the startling fullness of her breasts, the warmth of the small of her back—and resolved to hold her as fiercely as she held me.